A Surprisingly Useful Feature of Wattpad

I just discovered something about Wattpad and was so excited that I couldn’t wait until Monday to tell you about it. My story finally has enough readers on Wattpad that the metrics have kicked in. And, Wow!Presenting the demographics of readers is something Wattpad is doing very well. The new beta version of their analytics shows who is reading the story broken down by age and gender. Plus a cool color-coded map of the world shows what regions a story’s readers hail from. Hovering over each region shows the percent of readers from that location. Another screen tracks engagement for each posted part of the story, showing comments, unique readers and such. A third tab tracks readers by date. I don’t know where else I could find such detailed information about my story’s readers.

One metric really surprised me. Approximately 63% of my readers are female. Since I posted the story in the Fantasy genre, I expected the gender ratio to be closer to 50:50. That’s interesting enough that it may affect who I picture as my ideal reader as I write the sequels. Good stuff. Thank you, Wattpad!